


Keeping Your Eyes Closed

by stardropdream



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-10 01:42:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5564131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardropdream/pseuds/stardropdream
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>News of the war ending travels across the Channel. (coda fic for 2x10)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Your Eyes Closed

**Author's Note:**

> Originally a tumblr prompt for Milady finding out Athos survives the war. I've marked it as a coda fic just because it takes place after season 2 and before season 3... even if saying coda fic for 2x10 doesn't cover the massive time skip involved but you know.

The war has been over for over a month before she first hears of it. It’s understandable: news travels slow across the Channel, no love lost between the countries. The court here seems more interested in petty gossips – something she might have encouraged once, if only for the cover of secrecy to do her worst. It serves her well enough now and often the English ladies are charmed by her thick accent and demure way of presenting herself – all the better. Let them believe her a simple woman. Let them overlook her unless she needs their favor. 

No one knows her. No one knows her past. 

At least, no one has died. That much is the truth – that much she’s kept to herself. Her words to him, all those years ago, still remain so: that she doesn’t want to be that creature anymore. 

Funny, then, that she should become this, without him. There’s no one to ask her if it still aches, if it still presses down against her chest in a constricting, suffocating way. She doesn’t let anyone know.

Thinking of him is not a thought she’s forbidden in herself. She knows what would happen if she tried to suppress her thoughts. But she does not let herself linger in nostalgia – cannot afford that luxury of longing without succumbing to it. No outlet for her now. Nothing to make her go back. 

He made his choice. Perhaps it was a fool’s wish that he might choose differently, perhaps it was her own still-healing heart that made her believe she could be his choice, in the end. 

Still, then, this: the women twitter between themselves, discussing the war as if it is a far-flung dream and not a harsh reality. They remain untouched, their husbands still in court favor. Their husbands safe and in their arms. Some might wish for her own freedom, of being without her husband so far from home. Some might thank their stars their husbands might return to them each night. 

She does not press. She does not beg. The news comes to her slowly, fragments upon fragments – who is safe and who is dead. No names truly pass. There is mention of the captain of the Musketeers, his name whispered in the halls once or twice – one or two travelers to France remarking on his melancholy disposition—

Something she once knew well. She breathes in. 

She breathes out again. 

He is alive. Perhaps a kinder woman would be grateful for that much – but the spark and jag of anger twists up in her heart before she can banish it away. He could have been a man who did not live in that danger every day. He could be alive with her. They could be alive together. 

They could be together. 

But no. He is alive. At least there is that. Perhaps she can breathe, just this once, in a sense of relief. He must think of her not at all, she tells herself – the brittle reminder of the life he chose before her. Again. 

She does not let herself drown into nostalgia. The feeling rushes over her in waves, all the same. An undertow, a riptide – dragging her ever backward when she knows, she knows, how she knows – she must free herself. 

She breathes out. 

He is alive.


End file.
